When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, it was done so with the approval of the United Nations. But today, Israel's enemies routinely challenge the legitimacy of its very existence. So, under international law, who's right? Israel? Or its enemies?
Of all the countries that have come into existence in the last century, no country's birth certificate is more legitimate than that of Israel. One reason is that many of the men who founded the country—Theodore Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, and Yitzchak Shamir—were either lawyers or had legal training. They were obsessed with "making it legal."
Unlike almost every other country, lawyers, not generals, were the midwives of Israel's birth—or more accurately re-birth, since it had existed as an independent country twice before in history. Step by legal step Israel moved legally toward nationhood...
The phenomenon of questioning the very right of Israel to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people cannot be explained on legal grounds or on any other rational basis, for that matter. So, then, how can this worldwide attack on Israel alone be explained? Alan Dershowitz explains.
According to Blue-Eyes.com, Francis Albert Sinatra may have been one of America ‘s most famous Italian Catholics, but he kept the Jewish people and the State of Israel close to his heart, manifesting life-long commitments to fighting anti-Semitism and to activism on behalf of Israel .. Sinatra stepped forward in the early 1940s, when big names were needed to rouse America i nto saving Europe’s remaining Jews, and he sang at an “Action for Palestine ” rally (1947). He sat on the board of trustees of the SimonWiesenthal Center; and he donated over $1 million to Jerusalem's Hebrew University, which honored him by dedicating the Frank Sinatra International Student Center.. (The Center made heartbreaking headlines when terrorists bombed it in 2002, killing nine people.) As the result of his support for the Jewish State, his movies and records were banned in some Arab countries.
Sinatra helped Teddy Kollek, later the long-serving mayor of Jerusalem but then a member of the Haganah, by serving as a $1 million money-runner that helped Israel win the war. The Copacabana NYC nightclub, which was very much run and controlled by the same Luciano-related New York mafia crowd with whom Sinatra had become enmeshed, happened to be next door to the hotel out of which Haganah members were operating. In his autobiography, Kollek relates how, trying in March 1948 to circumvent an arms boycott imposed by President Harry Truman on the Jewish fighters in Eretz Yisroel, he needed to smuggle about $1 million in cash to an Irish ship captain docked in the Port of New York. The young Kollek spotted Sinatra at the bar and, afraid of being intercepted by federal agents, asked for help. In the early hours of the morning, the singer went out the back door with the money in a paper bag and successfully delivered it to the pier.
The origins of Sinatra’s love affair with the Jewish people are not clear but, for years, the Hollywood icon wore a small mezuzah around his neck, a gift from Mrs. Golden, an elderly Jewish neighbor who cared for him during his boyhood in Hoboken, N.J. (years later, he honored her by purchasing a quarter million dollars’ worth of Israel bonds). He protected his Jewish friends, once responding to an anti-Semitic remark at a party by simply punching the offender. Time magazine reported that Sinatra walked out on the christening of his own son when the priest refused to allow a Jewish friend to be the godfather. As late as 1979, he raged over the fact that a Palm Springs cemetery official in California declared that he could n ot arrange the burial of a deceased Jewish friend over the Thanksgiving holiday; Sinatra again — threatened to punch him in the nose.
Sinatra famously played the role of a pilot in Cast a Giant Shadow, the 1966 film filmed in Israel and starring friend Kirk Douglas as Mickey Marcus, the Jewish-American colonel who fought and died in Israel’s war for independence (Sinatra dive-bombs Egyptian tanks with seltzer bottles!) He donated his salary for the part to the Arab-Israeli Youth Center in Nazareth , and he also made a significant contribution to the making of Genocide, a film about the Holocaust, and helped raise funds for the film. Less known is Sinatra in Israel (1962), a short 30-minute featurette he made in which he sang In the Still of the Night and Without a Song. He also starred in The House I Live In (1945), a ten-minute short film made to oppose anti-Semitism at the end of World War II, which received an Honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe award in 1946.
A 1975 benefit concert recorded live in Jerusalem was officially released only in Brazil. Frank’s in fine form in STILL another impossible to find cd. Oy Vey !
